Author: Maria Mainelli

Ding.

I get a notification on my phone. It’s snowing out and I’m curled up in a chair that’s slowly fraying, matching my patience for being trapped inside. There’s a chill leaking through the shoddily built window frame, reminding me we’ve been stuck since March.

Through a dull fog that’s made my hands as heavy and clumsy as my mind, I turn the screen on and look and see I have been blessed with a MyChart message.

And if you’ve been personally victimized by a MyChart message, I want you to know that this is a safe space.

I assume it’s just my latest therapist putting in meeting notes but when I open the app, it says I have a new diagnosis. I click on it and in the time it takes for the message to load and my brain to process the words, my world has irreversibly changed.

The walls of my too-small apartment start to close in and I feel more trapped than I have all year. So in my next appointment, when my therapist sagely reveals my new diagnosis, of course not realizing it had already crushed me days before, all I can do is nod and listen to the voice in my head echo that life-altering word: 

bipolar.

I know that people have a lot to say about bipolar disorder. It’s one of the big, bad mental illnesses that lurks on the edge of people’s minds and in their conversations about the people they like the least or whose behavior annoys them the most.

And I can understand why some people are hesitant to engage, even if I don’t agree. There are a lot of dark parts to this illness. 

But I think judging anyone too quickly based on a label and not their actions is the best way to lose sight of what we owe each other.

And I think what I owe myself, and the world at large, the most is to talk openly and loudly and often about my diagnosis and how embracing the hardest pieces of me changed my life for the better, in ways that I’m still discovering five years later.

I’m 24 in late 2020, living in Brooklyn. The pots and pans we used to bang daily to recognize essential workers have been silent for weeks. The city feels strange. Or maybe I do. 

It’s December 12. This is not the day I got diagnosed, that had come a few weeks before. But the day something in me finally broke enough to get past the denial stage of my grief.

For weeks, I felt like none of this was really happening. Like I was living someone else’s life, like someone threw a stink bomb in my brain and sealed the windows.

After I get diagnosed, it’s hard for me to tell people. Because I don’t know what to say. Because I’m embarrassed. I’m angry at myself and the world and my brain chemistry and the pills I take and the therapist I see.

Because for the first time in my life, I’m facing the things I’ve done.

Through writing stories about my life, I start to remember more details about the episodes I’ve long accepted as blurred gaps in my memory. It’s amazing what our brains hold onto and what just a pen can uncover, even if it shakes in your hand.

I work through the time I was manic and took a train from my dorm on Long Island to meet up with a man I had matched with on tinder earlier that night. And I work through the subsequent spiral when he ghosted me 8 months later, which ultimately ended in me finding my husband and that ex working at a hot dog cart by Hudson Yards. Which is even funnier because he’s a vegetarian and annoying about it.

Things start to click into place. It feels jarring and hurts each time something suddenly makes sense but at the same time, it also feels… good? Like when you finally get home from a barbecue and you can floss your uncle’s overcooked brisket outta your molars.

I finally understand why I go through phases where I want to talk to everyone. Where I fall in love too quickly or get wrapped up in the heat of tangled limbs and shared breath and make reckless decisions that could easily suck other people into the gravity of my mistakes.

Speaking of gravity, I get why sometimes I feel so heavy. So numb. Like someone replaced my bones with rods of lead and my brain with a half-melted ball of wax.

I finally see the ways I’ve been hurting others but even more so, I can finally recognize my own pain. I understand why I cry so much. Why I feel so much. Why other people don’t understand how I interact with the world.

A year or two in and it feels like with more understanding comes more isolation. More alienation. More feeling as though I’m lying to people and presenting myself as human when I’m really just a sack of manure in a skin suit.

And it’s been maybe three years since my diagnosis when I get a text from a friend I’ve known for a few months. We work together at the same advertising agency, she actually helped me get the job. 

It’s a high pressure kind of place, very corporate. Processes and procedures for everything. Three days in the office no exceptions. You want something changed, you go through HR and the Big Boss.

At one point, I had reached out to see if I could cut back to two days in person for a month to accommodate an unspecified medical thing (the medical thing was a raging manic episode) and they required more explanation, a doctor’s note, and a meeting. 

I chickened out instead of getting the accommodations I needed, deserved, and was fully entitled to. Because some part of me felt like I didn’t deserve them because I didn’t “need” them enough.

Which, for the record, is one of my biggest regrets. Accept the help you deserve.

But I get a text one day from this coworker/friend and I open it and she’s asking me if I know what our employer would say if she asks to cut back to two days in person because of an unspecified medical thing. 

But because I’m a cool and fun girl and not a corporation, I do get an explanation. 

Her unspecified medical thing is… a raging manic episode?

And somehow, it’s like the Uno reverse of that MyChart message.

In another breath, my life changes again but for the first time in years, I feel like the walls aren’t slowly closing in but maybe starting to drift away from me. I take a breath that feels like my first. 

It’s suddenly obvious that I’m actually not as alone as I had made myself feel in the three long years of realizations and therapy appointments and stripping myself back to the most basic version of myself. 

To be clear, she didn’t know that I have bipolar, too. She just trusted me enough to tell me something about herself that I knew very personally is about as easy to tell people as it is to keep track of every med you tried when you first started out. 

The conversation about work isn’t important. What’s important enough for me to write about it is what came afterwards. In many ways, that text is why I’m such a loud and proud advocate for folks with this disorder. It not only spiraled into a friendship I wouldn’t trade for the world but it also spiraled into me finally understanding something that really matters.

I finally understand that I am not alone. That I never was and never had to be. 

What I was, was ashamed. I was so scared that people wouldn’t give me a chance that I never gave them the opportunity to surprise me. And I was quiet. I never spoke up, never tried to get other people to understand the things I now did about myself. 

But finally, I found community. Or scraped one together, I guess. 

My community is my husband, who makes sure I go to bed at a reasonable time. It’s my friends who always talk me down when I’m about to buy something like 500 worms on strings. It’s the team of doctors who care for me, my family that fights for me, and maybe most important? It’s the people who come to me after my shows and simply say “thank you, I didn’t know I needed that”.

Those are the people I need in my community the most. Because they remind me why I can never be quiet again.

I found my voice through writing through the pain, through all the times I had to grasp my hands together to keep them steady while telling someone my diagnosis. I found it through finding the humor and the light and joy in a disorder that so many people refuse to recognize makes us beautifully, uniquely human.

Here I am, five years later, writing with my pen steady in a hand that no longer shakes in fear when I say this… My name is Maria. I have bipolar disorder. 

There are days when I wish I could go back and change things I’ve done, when I wish I didn’t know what the range of human emotion feels like, when I would love to not have to remember to take my meds. When I wish that this wasn’t my life. 

But I owe it to myself to embrace it all. And myself, bipolar and all.

Because I like me. Finally.